She’s a Charlotte TV personality. He’s an Olympic gymnast. This is their love story.
“Welcome,” Mia Atkins says cheerfully as she sees guests through her front door. “This is my work-in-progress home.”
Atkins has had the keys to the place for more than two months now, after having moved from Colorado Springs to Charlotte sight unseen in late March to replace Colleen Odegaard as co-host of the NBC TV affiliate WCNC’s long-running morning lifestyle show.
But while the 1,800-square-foot single-story home in the Collins Park neighborhood looks practically brand-new inside and out — it was completely remodeled by the previous owner in 2020 — what she means by “work-in-progress” is that, well, it’s a little light on furnishings.
“Half of my stuff’s still in Colorado,” the 25-year-old Atkins explains, as she moves through a sparsely decorated swath of her living room, “so I’m putting together what I can until the rest of my stuff gets here.”
How soon will it arrive, exactly? There’s no way of knowing for sure. That’s just the way things have to be right now if the person who’s got the other half of your stuff is Sam Mikulak.
To explain: Mikulak is Atkins’s fiancé. He’s also the biggest men’s gymnastics star in the United States, a going-on-three-time Olympian who is one of this country’s brightest hopes in the sport for this July’s Games. As a result, he stayed behind in Colorado Springs after she moved so he could continue his training at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center. He qualified at the Trials in St. Louis last month and heads to Tokyo on Thursday — without Atkins, due to COVID restrictions.
On one hand, living 1,500-plus miles away from each other has not been the ideal way to get ready to get married.
At the same time, however, since getting engaged last July, Atkins and Mikulak seem to have found footing as individuals, a footing that for a while they’d lost hold of; they profess to be more mentally healthy than they’ve been in quite some time, thanks in no small part to therapy; and — despite the distance between them — in some ways, as a couple, they feel as close as they’ve ever felt.
This is their unconventional love story.
‘No gymnastics involved whatsoever’
To people interested in men’s gymnastics, Mikulak was basically a rock star in 2016.
Although ankle problems had plagued him in the summer of 2012, he managed a fifth-place finish on the vault at the London Olympics and went on to fulfill his promise as the sport’s new big thing by helping to lead the University of Michigan to NCAA titles in 2013 and 2014.
Given his success in college, there were high expectations for him when he went to Rio in 2016, but he fell just shy of bringing home a medal, finishing fourth on high bar and fifth in all-around. Still, after those Games, Mikulak received a hero’s welcome during the Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions, which showcased him and other U.S. Olympians (including Simone Biles and Aly Raisman) in cities all over the country.
As it turned out, one of those cities was the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Ariz., and as it turned out, a teammate of Mikulak’s had a stepsister in the same sorority as Atkins at Arizona State University.
So, on Sept. 21, 2016, touring gymnasts, including Mikulak, found themselves hanging out with Alpha Phis — including Atkins, who was studying to be a broadcaster at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
And Atkins had no idea who any of these people were.
“I didn’t know a single thing about gymnastics. Nothing,” says Atkins, who says she can’t even do a cartwheel and that she was much more musically than athletically inclined when she was growing up in the Chicago suburbs.
“I didn’t care about sports at all. It was just not my thing.”
Atkins and Mikulak both admit that there was an element of wow-she’s-hot and OMG-he’s-gorgeous that initially drew them into conversation. But what kept them in it — for eight straight hours that first day, Atkins says — was everything from their mutual affection for Harry Potter and the TV sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” to the realization that they had similar core values.
“The conversation just got really deep really quick,” Mikulak recalls. “And it seemed like we had known each other for a really long time.”
He also says the fact that she had no clue who he was “made a huge difference. ... It just felt good not feeling like, you know, ‘Hey, they’re just talking to me because of who I am.’ (It was just) ‘Hi, my name’s Mia.’ ‘Hi, I’m Sam. Nice to meet you.’
“No gymnastics involved whatsoever.”
‘Ohh my gosh. Who is this guy?’
Or, at least, no gymnastics until he invited her to the show the next night in Glendale, where Atkins watched with dropped jaw as Mikulak showed off what she calls “his crazy flips.”
“I still have I think some videos on my phone from when I went and saw that show,” she says, “of me being like, ‘Ohh my gosh. Who is this guy?’ ”
On the tour bus after the show, they agreed they had to stay in touch.
Three weeks later, during Arizona State’s fall break, Atkins flew back home to Chicago — ostensibly to visit her family, but perhaps maybe a little more so to see Mikulak, who was going to be in the Windy City that week for a Kellogg’s Tour stop. In November, she flew to California to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family. In December, he came to Arizona to be her date for a sorority formal. Then they spent New Year’s Eve together.
Other than the fact that they were having to do things long-distance, since Mikulak was tied to Colorado Springs and his training, it seemed like the start of a relationship.
But unbeknownst to Atkins, while they were ringing in 2017, Mikulak was having a personal crisis.
“I was at this point where I was like, ‘All right, do I want to do a long-distance relationship? Or do I want to be by myself?’ ” he explains. “Because I felt like, for a long time, I’ve just been surrounding myself with people ... and I don’t know, I was going through a time in my life where I was like, ‘I want some independence for myself.’
“And as our relationship started getting stronger, I felt like, ‘Uh-oh, you’re getting out of that rhythm. You’re getting out of your desire for independence.’ ... I always was a people-pleaser and just told people what they wanted, and so some part of me was like, ‘I need to fight for my independence.’ ”
A week into January, he broke off the relationship.
‘It’s better when you’re in it’
Amazingly, Atkins hung up the phone and just shrugged. She shared what happened with her roommate, who expressed surprise not only because Atkins wasn’t crying, but because she in fact looked basically unfazed.
“This just doesn’t feel like this is the end,” she recalls telling her roommate.
“For some reason,” Atkins says now, “I just had so much confidence that him and I were supposed to be together, and I figured maybe he just needs time, but I feel like he’s gonna come back to me.”
She nailed her prediction.
A couple of days after he broke up with her, Mikulak says he took himself to the top of a mountain in Colorado to spend time “contemplating life.” What he discovered was that Atkins had brought out the real Sam Mikulak, not the Sam Mikulak he thought he needed to be for coaches, or teammates, or fans, or other people who depended on him. And not only that, Atkins appreciated the real Sam Mikulak for who he was, instead of being disappointed in him, or expecting more from him.
When he came down from the mountain, he called her.
“Hey, would you have me back?” Mikulak asked her. “I miss you so much, and I want to live this life with you. I don’t know where things are gonna go, but I know that it’s better when you’re in it. When you’re going through life with me.”
All they needed to do next was figure out how to actually make that happen — that is, how to put them in a position to be in the same place at the same time together, much, much more often.
‘I can really connect with people’
While Atkins might not have a broadcasting resume as impressive as Mikulak’s athletic resume, she certainly seems to have taken a smart, focused, carefully crafted career path.
In middle school, she applied for and was eventually accepted into South Elgin (Ill.) High School’s Beacon Academy, a program for students interested in media and digital arts careers.
She then moved on to one of the nation’s top journalism schools, at Arizona State, and the summer after her third year of college landed an internship with a lifestyle show called “Your Life Arizona” at KPHO-TV, a CBS-affiliated TV station in Phoenix that wound up putting her on the air several times.
Almost immediately, Atkins determined that lifestyle shows — which cover things like entertainment, gardening, fashion, food, and other topical issues — were where she wanted to be, because, she says: “I can really connect with people, and I can show my personality and have fun with it.”
So as she prepared to graduate (early, after 3-1/2 years, in December 2017), she focused on two priorities: One was getting hired to work on a lifestyle show, and the other was getting a job in Colorado Springs so she could be with Mikulak.
As fate would have it, Atkins got both of her wishes.
At just 21 years old, she would be hosting and producing a morning lifestyle show called “Living Local” for KXRM-TV, a Fox-affiliated station in Colorado Springs, in a city of nearly half a million people and in a TV market considerably larger than what most of her peers could reasonably expect to work in as a freshly-minted college graduate.
It seemed like the perfect situation, given her tastes in broadcasting and her desire to be with Mikulak full-time. And it was perfect.
Until it wasn’t anymore.
‘Living in the pressure’
The highlight of 2020 for Atkins and Mikulak was getting engaged — just over a year ago, on July 8.
Mikulak orchestrated an elaborate proposal that started near the pier on California’s Catalina Island and ended atop a mountain, where friends and family jumped out from hiding places to surprise her as Mikulak dropped to one knee and offered her a 2-carat pear-shaped diamond ring he’d had custom-made for her.
But while it was, for both of them, one of the happiest days of their lives, plenty of dark days followed.
After the Olympics in Tokyo were postponed due to COVID, Mikulak says he fell into a depression and struggled with mental health issues. He was 27 going on 28, these were to be his final Games before he retired, and the decision to table them and the uncertainty of if, or when, they would happen left him feeling like he’d lost his purpose — had lost gymnastics — before he was mentally ready to.
His entire sense of self-worth had been wrapped up in the sport. He thought he could only be happy if he was competing, and competing well.
“I was living in the pressure,” is how he described that feeling in a story that appeared on Team USA’s website last month.
Meanwhile, Atkins was becoming more and more disillusioned with her job every day. In the beginning, she’d been so excited to launch a lifestyle show that she would get to help build from the ground up. But she says expectations became unreasonably high, that she constantly felt unappreciated for her efforts, and that the show wasn’t getting the resources it needed to be successful.
She began dreading going to work. Eventually, she too was falling into a depression and struggling with mental health issues herself.
‘It feels unnatural for us’
At first, they each focused all of their energy on trying to support the other person.
Then, Atkins says, “we kind of realized that we needed to start working on prioritizing ourselves first. And that’s been difficult. Because one, that’s not what we’re used to. It feels unnatural for us to sometimes have to take a step back and be like, ‘Hey, you need to handle this on your own because I need to handle my own stuff.’ ”
She started seeing a therapist in October. Her therapist recommended couples counseling, and they started attending sessions together this past January. A short time later, with the encouragement of both Atkins and Olympic swim legend Michael Phelps, Mikulak began seeing a therapist on his own.
Seeking professional help, they both say, has worked wonders.
Mikulak, for instance, says he has a much more relaxed approach towards gymnastics now: “I’m just happy to be going (to the Olympics) at this point, and happy to be having the experience. ... I’m gonna raise my hand out there and do it for the fact that I’m grateful to be continuing with this sport, because I’ve almost quit probably a hundred different times throughout this year, and I’m just proud of my resiliency to make a third Olympics.”
“I’m just doing it,” he adds, “for fun.”
They’ve also grown as a couple, through therapy.
“I think it’s probably been one of the best things that we have done,” Atkins says, “because now we are able to support each other more and understand each other more because we’re taking the time to focus on ourselves and focus on growing as individuals, so that we can be stronger as a couple together.”
On top of all that, this past spring, she was finally able to exhale after extracting herself from the situation that was causing her so much angst, by leaving her job at the station in Colorado Springs to co-host “Charlotte Today” for WCNC.
The key downside, of course, was that she and Mikulak would have to go back to being apart.
‘What I’m missing in my life’
Atkins last visited Mikulak in Colorado over Memorial Day weekend, when her father drove her across the country so she could pick up two of the couple’s three dogs: Lily and Barney, who — like Marshall, the dog that stayed behind with Mikulak — are named for “How I Met Your Mother” characters.
They saw each other again at the end of June, when Mikulak clinched his berth at the Olympics at the Trials in St. Louis (where, it’s worth noting, NBC’s cameras seemed to be as interested in Atkins’s reactions to his routines as they were in his actual routines).
They won’t be together again until after he returns from Tokyo, and there’s no telling exactly when due to the unpredictability of various COVID protocols for international travelers and of his post-Olympics schedule, given that a successful showing at the Games could make him in high demand for media opportunities and other assorted public appearances.
But eventually, perhaps before the end of the summer but more likely in the early fall, Mikulak will pack up the other half of the couple’s things and bring them to Charlotte.
So what will he do once he gets here?
If you believe what’s been written in several of the stories that mention his retirement plans, he’ll be opening a gym in Charlotte. He says that’s not the plan anymore, though.
“I wanted to do that for a very long time,” Mikulak says. “I was doing a lot of work a couple months ago to get that whole gym set up right after I was done with the Games. And I think there was a lot of anxiety going along with it because some part of me felt like it was something I had to do more so than what I wanted to do. ...
“I feel like what I’m missing in my life right now is service, and being able to positively affect other people’s lives on a much deeper level than just, ‘Hey, I’m providing a place for you to do gymnastics.’ ”
Instead, after settling in North Carolina, he plans to start working toward earning a master’s degree — in sports psychology.
‘Gonna make my way up’
Those stories about his retirement plans, by the way, also have tended to make just passing mentions of Atkins.
And while at times she’s been a little frustrated with her identity being reduced to “Sam Mikulak’s fiancée,” the tables, they may be a-turnin’.
Mikulak’s Olympic career will be over soon, and he’s not putting his name on a gym that might extend his celebrity. In fact, he says he’s excited to “ride off Mia’s coattails for getting such a sweet job.”
Atkins, meanwhile, is just 25 years old and co-hosting a lifestyle show with a local legend — former NFL star Eugene Robinson — on one of the most powerful news stations in Charlotte, the 21st-largest broadcast market in the country.
“That’s what I always say to myself: This is his time,” Atkins says, laughing, “but I’m gonna make my way up to a big national show someday.
“And he’ll be ‘Mia Atkins’s husband.’”
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Watch Sam Mikulak compete
The Tokyo Olympic Games are scheduled to run from July 23 to Aug. 8, 2021.
NBC is home to the Olympics, and in Charlotte, that means WCNC will air prime-time coverage starting at 8 nightly. The Games also can be viewed on the streaming service Peacock, NBCOlympics.com and NBC Sports.
The Olympic men’s gymnastics events will be held from July 24 to Aug. 3; with the time difference, they begin July 23 in the U.S. All times are Eastern Daylight Time, as outlined on the Today.com website.
Friday, July 23, 9 p.m.: Twelve men’s teams compete for a spot in the final; gymnasts also compete for spots in the all-around and apparatus finals.
Monday, July 26, 6 a.m.: The top eight teams compete in the men’s gymnastics team final.
Wednesday, July 28, 6:15 a.m.: The top 24 gymnasts compete in the men’s individual all-around final.
Sunday, Aug. 1, 4 a.m.: The men compete on floor exercise and pommel horse.
Monday, Aug, 2, 4 a.m.: The men compete on rings and vault.
Tuesday, Aug. 3, 4 a.m.: The men compete on parallel bars and high bar.
This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
